Ricky Rudd has announced that the 2007 Nextel Cup season will be his last and that he will retire from Cup racing at the end of the current season.
Rudd's announcement came on Sunday morning at the Michigan International Speedway, site of Sunday's 3M Performance 400 bringing down the curtain on a Cup Series career that began at the North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham in March 1975.
Although Rudd stepped back from the Nextel Cup Series at the end of the 2005 season following a three-year spell with the Wood Brothers he said that he wasn't retiring but just taking a sabbatical having started every single Cup Series race since the start of the 1981 season.
Then, at the age of 50 Rudd returned to the cockpit with old employer Robert Yates at the start of 2007, charged with bringing RYR back to its former glories and helping to guide new steed David Gilliland but despite qualifying on the front row for the season opening
Daytona 500 it has been downhill ever since with just one top ten finish leaving him 29th in the drivers standings heading in to Sunday's race.
![Ricky Rudd - Snickers Ford [pic credit: Ford media/Autostock]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/283638.jpg)
